Editorial: SuperSlow® and Osteoporosis Research

On June 22, 1994, NBC aired a segment regarding a Tufts University Study (Maria A. Fiatarone, MD, et al, The New England Journal of Medicine 1994;330:25, pp.1769-1775) on exercise for 100 nursing home residents, average age: 87. The study lasted only 10 weeks. Heralded as one of the most important medical discoveries ever about how to treat the elderly, this study reported a 12% increase in the residents' ability to walk and a 28% increase in their ability to climb stairs. All of the participants suffered from chronic age-related problems such as heart disease, dementia, arthritis, and osteoporosis. Nutritional supplementation showed absolutely no effect in benefit while weight training did.

This study, and many more like it, are long overdue. I applaud these studies because they will confirm in academic circles what we have been doing with SuperSlow® since 1982. Although the same Tufts study was mentioned in many magazines and newspapers, the NBC video showed the participants in training. For the most part, they performed very slow movements. I certainly do not know if the researchers borrowed the idea from Ellington Darden's books in which SuperSlow® is highlighted; read my materials; or evolved the necessity to move slowly on their own. I rather suspect that the population with which they worked were so frightened to move, that the only way the subjects would dare to move at all was creepy slow.

From 1983-1986, I trained Ethel Rusk in Gainesville, Florida at the Nautilus®-funded Osteoporosis Study. Ethel was in her late sixties when she began; however, she could not pass the minimum entrance test requirement -- ablilty to walk on a treadmill. The researchers could not obtain a complete EKG strip on her because she could not walk on the treadmill long enough. Fudging their own impanelment rules and desperate for subjects, the researchers permitted Ethel to practice walking on the treadmill for several days to obtain the necessary competence to eventually provide a complete strip.

Ethel was healthy enough to qualify for the study in every other way, but her mobility was extremely limited. She required assistance pushing her grocery cart and could not travel anywhere alone and unassisted. And as explained in Volume 2, Issue 1 of The Exercise Standard, mobility loss is merely the first stage of losing all other biological competence in an otherwise healthy subject.

I consented to train Ethel despite these problems. Within six months Ethel was making trips to Europe twice a year by herself. During her stint with the Osteoporosis Study, Ethel made no objective improvements in any of the so-called standardized tests such as VO2Max or Bone Densitometry. Of course, these and many other measuring devices that we used 1982-1986 were either known to be or later found to be worthless. Nevertheless, Ethel's ability to improve to be a functional human being was a subjective observation not appropriate to report as data. As far as I know, it has never been mentioned in print until now.

Mobility is not easy to grade and often does not lend itself as data, per se. There is no self-contained device on which one walks, climbs, crawls, rolls, bends, and stoops to obtain a grade in mobility. This is one possible reason why the researchers never considered reporting its variation. But mobility assessment, even if it is merely a pass-fail evaluation, is perhaps the most important finding of any study performed with seniors. A subject's ability to move, to dress himself, to feed himself, to perform basic life sustaining action, is THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT IMPACT on his quality of life and on the cost of his life to the rest of society.

Also note that Ethel's improvements would have been reported in the Tufts study. Its mentioning of the 12% and 28% figures regarding walking and stair climbing improvements, respectively, imply to me that the researchers have, once again, devised quantitative reports for qualitative observation. I shudder when supposed scientists put numbers on their feelings. I guess this seems natural to the exercise physiologists, however. They rate gymnastic performances and other events similarly. Why not walking? Fiatarone's analysis appears, however, to be based on speed improvement and is reasonably appropriate for the situation. I also admit that I am ignorant, as well as suspect, of this test.

Ethel's close friend, Mary Cahill, also experienced dramatic improvement in her quality of life due to the SuperSlow® Exercise Program. Mary suffered from bursitis and arthritis. She loved to knit and could not do so for extended periods due to her debilities. She knitted a shawl for Brenda Hutchins to demonstrate her improved capacity. This demonstration was, of course, not quantified in the data for the Osteoporosis Study.

It has taken more than ten years for the exercise physiology community to open its eyes to the fact that the only real and meaningful exercise is SuperSlow® Exercise performed primarily for the purpose of muscular strengthening. By "primarily" I mean that if muscular strengthening is the first objective of the program, then all other benefits will follow.

Realize that it was the exercise physiologists that ruined the Nautilus Osteoporosis Study with the insistence that aerobics should be emphasized just as much as muscular strengthening. Their ilk also pressured me hard to stop the SuperSlow® thing. (See The Exercise Standard, Volume 2, Issue 2, page 2.) Their hero at that time was Everett Smith and his emphasis on aerobics dance as the godsend to victims of osteoporosis. As a result, an entire decade of missed opportunity has passed without widespread mobilization of social workers and nursing staff to master and disseminate SuperSlow® to the nursing homes and retirement communities. Millions of our seniors have missed out on the higher quality of life that could have been possible. Billions of medical dollars could have been easily saved and/or diverted to other, more critical medical issues. The Tufts University Study and other similar studies appear to herald a revelation. Few medical researchers or patients will appreciate that the academic bureaucracy and dogma have delayed, if not largely prevented, invaluable benefit to the general public.

The foot dragging will not stop here. For example, Dr. Ellington Darden mentioned to me, five or six years ago, that the nutrition community was beginning to appreciate the role of muscular strengthening and maintenance in fat-loss regimens; however, they would remain clueless as to how to effect muscular strengthening for many years to come. Notice that today you can find hundreds of articles in popular magazines extolling the importance of muscle for obtaining a so-called hard body. I speculate that, at first, the new converts to muscle naturally will seek the advice of the muscleheads. They will then spend several decades wallowing in the myths of multiple sets, pyramiding techniques, and ballistic movements -- of course, mixed with some form of aerobics. Eventually they will go on to Nautilus philosophy and then to SuperSlow®.

Witness that Covert Bailey emphasizes the importance of muscle in basal metabolism but then promotes steady state activity as an efficacious means to obtain it. Covert Bailey has many fervent followers and he apparently means well, but he does not understand exercise.

So it similarly will go with those in osteoporosis research. If they admit to muscular strengthening, then they will first mix any chosen protocol with their old standby, aerobics (in some form). Not knowing the researchers at Tufts or the particulars of their program, I suspect that it will take another twenty years for them to appreciate that they could have gotten yet better results by training the elderly twice a week rather than thrice; by performing one set of each exercise rather than two or three; by doing only six or eight exercises rather than 12-20; by training the entire body rather than just the lower body and by abolishing aerobics forever. Nevertheless, I hope that Dr. Fiatarone will continue her work with longer and larger studies. She seems to be a credible physician with her interest in the correct direction.